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Antennas

“Buy a $10 radio and a $100 antenna” - Old ham radio saying.

The stock antenna supplied with the dongles is pretty hopeless. It is strongly recommended that a purpose built or purchased antenna is used and placed outside and as up high as possible. This is to get as much signal as possible and also get the antenna away from bad sources of interference - a laptop, PC and plasma and LCD screens will definitely create a lot of unwanted noise across the whole spectrum.

Cable

RG6 Quadshield: This cable is cheap and fairly ubiquitous as it's very good cable for digital TV and satellite receivers (and by extension RTLSDR). The connectors (so called 'F' type) are very easy to attach and also cheap. RG6 is 75 ohms and try to keep all the connectors and adapters at 75 ohms too.

F connectors can be robustly fitted by using a kind that requires an expensive crimp tool. There are also much easier to use push-to-fit and screw-to-fit kind that only need the puniest of software developer's muscles to attach.

Shielding

Amplifiers

Filters

Antennas

Discone antennas are good omni directional broadband antennas. As the RTLSDR is very broadband (60MHz to 1700MHz) the broader the better.